E.J. Graff

E.J. Graff writes on social-justice and human-rights issues, particularly discrimination and violence against women and children; marriage and family policy; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lives. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center and the author of What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution (Beacon Press, 1999, 2004).

Recent Articles

When the Sandy Hook news first came along, my wife and I had the same instinct: turn off the news before the boy gets home. We’re practiced, here, in information lockdown; we’ve protected him from hearing about Aurora or the Sikh temple or any other of the mass shootings. There would be no NPR and no TV news; newspapers would go face down, into a private pile, where he couldn’t see a headline. The fact that someone had shot up a school whose oldest children were in his grade, maybe two hours from where we live, was not a fact we wanted to enter his emotional world. Every parent I know had a different strategy, and rightly so. Every child is different. Ours has long had a particular anxiety about “bad guys” breaking in and trying to hurt him or his family. His mom is a prosecutor; while she doesn’t talk details, he does know there are some really bad people in the world who do bad things, and that when she can she keeps them in jail. His Lego projects have regularly included jails...

Last week, when the Supreme Court decided to take both the Proposition 8 case, which challenges California's constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and a challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which barrs the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in the states, my inner Eeyore got a little carried away. I realized that when Brian Brown—head of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the chief opponent of marriage equality, started quoting me in his fundraising e-mails. While I’m honored he would notice, that made me recognize I should explain my thinking more clearly. So here it is: Within ten years, most American states will be marrying same-sex couples. Within 15, the Supreme Court will knock down the remaining bans on marriage equality. All of that could come sooner if the Court rules with us this year in the two gay-marriage cases. But marriage equality is going to win within our lifetimes. (Here, I am morally obligated to...

Tonight, you’ll hear on the news that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the "gay marriage cases.” Much of the mainstream ( i.e. , straight) media will be treating the two cases they’ve taken—a challenge to California's ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, and a challenge to DOMA, the federal law that prohibits the government from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in the states—as essentially the same. Don’t be fooled. The cases are very different. The fact that SCOTUS has taken both has a lot of us very worried. Let’s start with the more famous one: the Prop. 8 case. This is the one we did not want the Court to take. At its simplest, the lawsuit—brought by star lawyer team Ted Olsen and David Boies—is asking the Court to consider whether Prop. 8 is constitutional; it’s about whether there’s a fundamental right for same-sex couples to marry. When the California electorate passed Prop. 8 in 2008, you may recall, it overturned the state supreme court’s decision to allow...

Ap Photo Kate Middleton and Prince William on their wedding day I know you can hardly stand the excitement: Princess Kate is preggers! Finally, the QEII can step out of service, passing off the baton—er, scepter—in a way that skips right past her reprobate son. Finally, she has a new generation in line that understands the royal job: Get married, reproduce, and stay honorably married. Which, as you may have noticed over the weekend, is just what The New York Times 's Ross Douthat wants us reprobate Americans to start doing. In what began as an almost sensible column, Douthat noted that public policy can help encourage working people to have families. But then Douthat ran right off the rails, chiding us for our lack of character, our selfish decadence, our end-of-empire exhaustion, and for preferring the comforts of—oh, I don’t know, maybe paying the mortgage?—to the sacrifices of raising more children. Herewith: The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-...

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court looked into the question of who counts as a “supervisor” for the purpose of employment law. If you’re not an employment-law watcher, it sounds like the legal equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But the answer is going to have real-life consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Let me illustrate. Imagine this: You’re a teenage girl working at a pizza place. You’re often scheduled to work with John, a leering guy in his twenties who has the same title that you do. But because John’s been working there six months longer, and is ten years older than you are, the assistant manager often leaves him in charge of the shift. John can’t officially fire you—only the assistant manager can do that—but he gets to tell you what to do on a given day. Here's the horrifying part: John gropes you grossly whenever he’s alone with you on the floor, in ways too explicit to be listed here. When you’re standing at the cash register, if...